Topography and Drainage

Geographers traditionally divide the vast territory of Russia into
five natural zones: the tundra zone; the taiga, or forest, zone; the
steppe, or plains, zone; the arid zone; and the mountain zone. Most of
Russia consists of two plains (the East European Plain and the West
Siberian Plain), two lowlands (the North Siberian and the Kolyma, in far
northeastern Siberia), two plateaus (the Central Siberian Plateau and
the Lena Plateau to its east), and a series of mountainous areas mainly
concentrated in the extreme northeast or extending intermittently along
the southern border.

Topography

The East European Plain encompasses most of European Russia. The West
Siberian Plain, which is the world's largest, extends east from the
Urals to the Yenisey River. Because the terrain and vegetation are
relatively uniform in each of the natural zones, Russia presents an
illusion of uniformity. Nevertheless, Russian territory contains all the
major vegetation zones of the world except a tropical rain forest.

About 10 percent of Russia is tundra, or treeless, marshy plain. The
tundra is Russia's northernmost zone, stretching from the Finnish border
in the west to the Bering Strait in the east, then running south along
the Pacific coast to the northern Kamchatka Peninsula. The zone is known
for its herds of wild reindeer, for so-called white nights (dusk at
midnight, dawn shortly thereafter) in summer, and for days of total
darkness in winter. The long, harsh winters and lack of sunshine allow
only mosses, lichens, and dwarf willows and shrubs to sprout low above
the barren permafrost (see Glossary). Although several powerful Siberian
rivers traverse this zone as they flow northward to the Arctic Ocean,
partial and intermittent thawing hamper drainage of the numerous lakes,
ponds, and swamps of the tundra. Frost weathering is the most important
physical process here, gradually shaping a landscape that was severely
modified by glaciation in the last ice age. Less than 1 percent of
Russia's population lives in this zone. The fishing and port industries
of the northwestern Kola Peninsula and the huge oil and gas fields of
northwestern Siberia are the largest employers in the tundra. With a
population of 180,000, the industrial frontier city of Noril'sk is
second in population to Murmansk among Russia's settlements above the
Arctic Circle.

The taiga, which is the world's largest forest region, contains
mostly coniferous spruce, fir, cedar, and larch. This is the largest
natural zone of the Russian Federation, an area about the size of the
United States. In the northeastern portion of this belt, long and severe
winters frequently bring the world's coldest temperatures for inhabited
areas. The taiga zone extends in a broad band across the middle
latitudes, stretching from the Finnish border in the west to the
Verkhoyansk Range in northeastern Siberia and as far south as the
southern shores of Lake Baikal. Isolated sections of taiga also exist
along mountain ranges such as the southern part of the Urals and in the
Amur River valley bordering China in the Far East. About 33 percent of
Russia's population lives in this zone, which, together with a band of
mixed forest to its south, includes most of the European part of Russia
and the ancestral lands of the earliest Slavic settlers.

The steppe has long been depicted as the typical Russian landscape.
It is a broad band of treeless, grassy plains, interrupted by mountain
ranges, extending from Hungary across Ukraine, southern Russia, and
Kazakstan before ending in Manchuria. Most of the Soviet Union's steppe
zone was located in the Ukrainian and Kazak republics; the much smaller
Russian steppe is located mainly between those nations, extending
southward between the Black and Caspian seas before blending into the
increasingly desiccated territory of the Republic of Kalmykia. In a
country of extremes, the steppe zone provides the most favorable
conditions for human settlement and agriculture because of its moderate
temperatures and normally adequate levels of sunshine and moisture. Even
here, however, agricultural yields are sometimes adversely affected by
unpredictable levels of precipitation and occasional catastrophic
droughts.

Russia's mountain ranges are located principally along its
continental divide (the Urals), along the southwestern border (the
Caucasus), along the border with Mongolia (the eastern and western Sayan
ranges and the western extremity of the Altay Range), and in eastern
Siberia (a complex system of ranges in the northeastern corner of the
country and forming the spine of the Kamchatka Peninsula, and lesser
mountains extending along the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan).
Russia has nine major mountain ranges. In general, the eastern half of
the country is much more mountainous than the western half, the interior
of which is dominated by low plains. The traditional dividing line
between the east and the west is the Yenisey Valley. In delineating the
western edge of the Central Siberian Plateau from the West Siberian
Plain, the Yenisey runs from near the Mongolian border northward into
the Arctic Ocean west of the Taymyr Peninsula.

The Urals are the most famous of the country's mountain ranges
because they form the natural boundary between Europe and Asia and
contain valuable mineral deposits. The range extends about 2,100
kilometers from the Arctic Ocean to the northern border of Kazakstan. In
terms of elevation and vegetation, however, the Urals are far from
impressive, and they do not serve as a formidable natural barrier.
Several low passes provide major transportation routes through the Urals
eastward from Europe. The highest peak, Mount Narodnaya, is 1,894
meters, lower than the highest of the Appalachian Mountains.

To the east of the Urals is the West Siberian Plain, which covers
more than 2.5 million square kilometers, stretching about 1,900
kilometers from west to east and about 2,400 kilometers from north to
south. With more than half its territory below 500 meters in elevation,
the plain contains some of the world's largest swamps and floodplains.
Most of the plain's population lives in the drier section south of 55°
north latitude.

The region directly east of the West Siberian Plain is the Central
Siberian Plateau, which extends eastward from the Yenisey River valley
to the Lena River valley. The region is divided into several plateaus,
with elevations ranging between 320 and 740 meters; the highest
elevation is about 1,800 meters, in the northern Putoran Mountains. The
plain is bounded on the south by the Baikal mountain system and on the
north by the North Siberian Lowland, an extension of the West Siberian
Plain extending into the Taymyr Peninsula on the Arctic Ocean.

Truly alpine terrain appears in the southern mountain ranges. Between
the Black and Caspian seas, the Caucasus Mountains rise to impressive
heights, forming a boundary between Europe and Asia. One of the peaks,
Mount Elbrus, is the highest point in Europe, at 5,642 meters. The
geological structure of the Caucasus extends to the northwest as the
Crimean and Carpathian mountains and southeastward into Central Asia as
the Tian Shan and Pamirs. The Caucasus Mountains create an imposing
natural barrier between Russia and its neighbors to the southwest,
Georgia and Azerbaijan.

In the mountain system west of Lake Baikal in south-central Siberia,
the highest elevations are 3,300 meters in the Western Sayan, 3,200
meters in the Eastern Sayan, and 4,500 meters at Mount Belukha in the
Altay Range. The Eastern Sayan reach nearly to the southern shore of
Lake Baikal; at the lake, there is an elevation difference of more than
4,500 meters between the nearest mountain, 2,840 meters high, and the
deepest part of the lake, which is 1,700 meters below sea level. The
mountain systems east of Lake Baikal are lower, forming a complex of
minor ranges and valleys that reaches from the lake to the Pacific
coast. The maximum height of the Stanovoy Range, which runs west to east
from northern Lake Baikal to the Sea of Okhotsk, is 2,550 meters. To the
south of that range is southeastern Siberia, whose mountains reach 2,800
feet. Across the Tatar Strait from that region is Sakhalin Island, where
the highest elevation is about 1,700 meters.

Northeastern Siberia, north of the Stanovoy Range, is an extremely
mountainous region. The long Kamchatka Peninsula, which juts southward
into the Sea of Okhotsk, includes many volcanic peaks, some of which
still are active. The highest is the 4,750-meter Klyuchevskaya Volcano,
the highest point in the Russian Far East. The volcanic chain continues
from the southern tip of Kamchatka southward through the Kuril Islands
chain and into Japan. Kamchatka also is one of Russia's two centers of
seismic activity (the other is the Caucasus). In 1994 a major earthquake
largely destroyed the oil-processing city of Neftegorsk.

Drainage

Russia is a water-rich country. The earliest settlements in the
country sprang up along the rivers, where most of the urban population
continues to live. The Volga, Europe's longest river, is by far Russia's
most important commercial waterway. Four of the country's thirteen
largest cities are located on its banks: Nizhniy Novgorod, Samara,
Kazan', and Volgograd. The Kama River, which flows west from the
southern Urals to join the Volga in the Republic of Tatarstan, is a
second key European water system whose banks are densely populated.

Russia has thousands of rivers and inland bodies of water, providing
it with one of the world's largest surface-water resources. However,
most of Russia's rivers and streams belong to the Arctic drainage basin,
which lies mainly in Siberia but also includes part of European Russia.
Altogether, 84 percent of Russia's surface water is located east of the
Urals in rivers flowing through sparsely populated territory and into
the Arctic and Pacific oceans. In contrast, areas with the highest
concentrations of population, and therefore the highest demand for water
supplies, tend to have the warmest climates and highest rates of
evaporation. As a result, densely populated areas such as the Don and
Kuban' river basins north of the Caucasus have barely adequate (or in
some cases inadequate) water resources.

Forty of Russia's rivers longer than 1,000 kilometers are east of the
Urals, including the three major rivers that drain Siberia as they flow
northward to the Arctic Ocean: the Irtysh-Ob' system (totaling 5,380
kilometers), the Yenisey (4,000 kilometers), and the Lena (3,630
kilometers). The basins of those river systems cover about 8 million
square kilometers, discharging nearly 50,000 cubic meters of water per
second into the Arctic Ocean. The northward flow of these rivers means
that source areas thaw before the areas downstream, creating vast swamps
such as the 48,000-square-kilometer Vasyugane Swamp in the center of the
West Siberian Plain. The same is true of other river systems, including
the Pechora and the North Dvina in Europe and the Kolyma and the
Indigirka in Siberia. Approximately 10 percent of Russian territory is
classified as swampland.

A number of other rivers drain Siberia from eastern mountain ranges
into the Pacific Ocean. The Amur River and its main tributary, the
Ussuri, form a long stretch of the winding boundary between Russia and
China. The Amur system drains most of southeastern Siberia. Three basins
drain European Russia. The Dnepr, which flows mainly through Belarus and
Ukraine, has its headwaters in the hills west of Moscow. The
1,860-kilometer Don originates in the Central Russian Upland south of
Moscow and then flows into the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea at
Rostov-na-Donu. The Volga is the third and by far the largest of the
European systems, rising in the Valday Hills west of Moscow and
meandering southeastward for 3,510 kilometers before emptying into the
Caspian Sea. Altogether, the Volga system drains about 1.4 million
square kilometers. Linked by several canals, European Russia's rivers
long have been a vital transportation system; the Volga system still
carries two-thirds of Russia's inland water traffic (see Transportation,
ch. 6).

Russia's inland bodies of water are chiefly a legacy of extensive
glaciation. In European Russia, the largest lakes are Ladoga and Onega
northeast of St. Petersburg, Lake Peipus on the Estonian border, and the
Rybinsk Reservoir north of Moscow. Smaller man-made reservoirs, 160 to
320 kilometers long, are on the Don, the Kama, and the Volga rivers.
Many large reservoirs also have been constructed on the Siberian rivers;
the Bratsk Reservoir northwest of Lake Baikal is one of the world's
largest.

The most prominent of Russia's bodies of fresh water is Lake Baikal,
the world's deepest and most capacious freshwater lake. Lake Baikal
alone holds 85 percent of the freshwater resources of the lakes in
Russia and 20 percent of the world's total. It extends 632 kilometers in
length and fifty-nine kilometers across at its widest point. Its maximum
depth is 1,713 meters. Numerous smaller lakes dot the northern regions
of the European and Siberian plains. The largest of these are lakes
Beloye, Topozero, Vyg, and Il'men' in the European northwest and Lake
Chany in southwestern Siberia.